Adrift in the Middle Kingdom

By J Slauerhoff

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff’s 1934 novel Adrift in the Middle Kingdom is an epic sweep of narrative that takes the reader from 1920s Shanghai to a forgotten city beyond the Great Wall of China.

Narrated by a Belfast ship’s radio operator who travels inland on a gun-runner’s mission, desperate to escape the sea. He moves through extraordinary settings of opium salons, the house of a Cantonese watch-mender, the siege of Shanghai, the great flood on the western plains, and the discovery of oil by the uncomprehending overlord in the hidden city of Chungking. The fantasy ending transforms the novel from travelogue and adventure into existential meditation. But running like a thread of darkness through the story is opium, from poppy head harvesting to death through addiction.

This translation by David McKay, winner of the 2018 Vondel Prize, is the first English edition of Slauerhoff’s most accessible and enthralling novel. The Introduction is by Slauerhoff expert Arie Pos and Wendy Gan of the University of Hong Kong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Handheld Classics
• Release date: Aug 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999944889

J Slauerhoff

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship’s doctor serving in south-east Asia, and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. He is best known for his Modernist poetry, but his two novels, published in English as The Forbidden Kingdom and Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, are very popular. He died of tuberculosis in 1936.

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Introduction

Slauerhoff and the novel

by ARIE POS

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Dutch literature, and his poetry and prose continue to fascinate large numbers of readers. His short and troubled life was a restless quest for happiness, lasting love, a home and peace of mind, none of which he found. Born in Leeuwarden, the provincial capital of Friesland in the cold north of the Netherlands, he was asthmatic from an early age and could only breathe more freely during summer holidays on the island of Vlieland. The vitalising contact with the sea, the stories of seamen in his family and his passion for books about adventurous voyages and exotic cultures inspired a longing to travel and see the world.

He studied medicine at Amsterdam University from 1916 to 1923, and published his first poems in student magazines and literary reviews. After making sea trips to France and Portugal he decided to become a ship’s doctor. It seemed a good choice to get away from the cold and wet Dutch climate and the petty bourgeois society that he despised. His first collection of poetry, Archipel, was published at the end of November 1923 and a week after he took his Hippocratic Oath. In early 1924 he was on his way to the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) to start a floating doctor’s life in the Far East. However, shortly before his arrival in Batavia (modern Jakarta) he suffered a lung haemorrhage, later diagnosed as a first sign of tuberculosis. He returned to the Netherlands to recover and worked for short periods as a locum before returning to Batavia, where he signed a contract with the Java-China-Japan Line in September 1925.

For two years he served as a doctor on the ‘coolie boats’ that transported Chinese plantation workers to and from Java and took other passengers and freight to Hong Kong and the ports on China’s south and east coasts. The ports he visited most frequently on the twelve journeys he made before his return to Europe in October 1927 were Hong Kong, Amoy and Shanghai. On some journeys the route included extra stops in the Philippines, Korea or Japan. Slauerhoff was able to leave his ship and visit the city or make small excursions inland. He took notes, kept a diary and wrote poetry and travelogues. His years in the Far East formed a major inspiration for his literary work; as well as poetry he wrote short stories and two novels set in China, the country that fascinated him throughout his life.

From 1928 to 1931 Slauerhoff worked on the luxurious Royal Holland Lloyd ocean liners, sailing from their home port of Amsterdam to South America. On his return he often had to recuperate from illness, and on one of his sick leaves in Holland he met the dancer Darja Collin, whom he married in September 1930. During another sick leave Darja gave birth to a still-born son in April 1932, a tragic event which affected Slauerhoff deeply and destabilised their marriage. Half a year later he started the first of five voyages to Africa as a doctor for the Holland West Africa Line.

Because of his health problems he often thought of giving up his work at sea and he looked for places with a more stable, warm and dry climate where he could settle as a doctor or consul, but his inquiries about possibilities in Shanghai, Lisbon, Barcelona, South America and Persia came to nothing. In 1934 he set up a private medical practice in Tangier but after half a year he gave it up and went back to Holland where his divorce from Darja Collin was granted. He returned to sea and travelled to South America and then to Africa. In Mozambique he contracted a severe form of malaria which, in combination with his tuberculosis, proved fatal. After a year of vain hopes of recovery in convalescent homes in Italy, Switzerland and Holland, Slauerhoff died in Hilversum on 5 October 1936 at the age of 38, three months after the publication of his last collection of poetry, which was ominously entitled An Honest Seaman’s Grave (Een eerlijk zeemansgraf). He published ten volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, two novels and a play. A third novel appeared posthumously in 1937.

A large part of Slauerhoff’s poetry and prose is dedicated to the sea and the seaman’s life, situated in exotic settings, often featuring lonely wanderers trying to reach the unattainable on endless seas, in desolate deserts or amidst the ruins of a glorious past. Slauerhoff expressed his own romantic longing and disillusion with reality through transfigured images of pirates and desperados, and of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and the eighteenth-century Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, military conquerors such as Genghis Khan and Napoleon, and the poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Corbière, Camões and Po chü-i. Taking liberties with biographical facts he recreated them as images of himself and his companions in misfortune. By inserting himself into the lineage of the French poètes maudits and of a Portuguese and a Chinese poet whom he pictured as equally doomed, unhappy wanderers and outsiders in a hostile world, he created his own many-faced muse whose inspiration was necessary but had to be carefully controlled to avoid his own identity being subsumed into those of his inspirations. This ‘struggle with the demon’ appears in many forms throughout Slauerhoff’s work, often linked to the central motif of ‘the hollow man’ who is looking for a way to fill the emptiness of his seemingly meaningless existence. Although there is no proof that Slauerhoff was acquainted with T S Eliot’s The Hollow Men and The Waste Land or Ezra Pound’s Personae, or the heteronymous poems of Fernando Pessoa, Slauerhoff’s handling of themes such as identity, alienation, depersonalisation and multiple personalities place him in the international tradition of modernism.

The same can be said of his pessimism about the future of Europe. Like many other authors and artists active after the First World War he felt that Western civilization was in decline and had lost its vital energy, becoming incapable of new achievements. This view was highly influenced by the compelling comparative study of cultures presented by the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918–1922), which had become a widely read and much discussed international success. Spengler demonstrated that, like all living organisms, cultures were born, grew, flourished and, inevitably, declined. Spengler’s intuitive and symbolic interpretations of historic events as expressions of the ‘soul’ of a culture in determined stages of its organic life met with heavy scholarly criticism but were especially appealing to writers and artists during the period between the two world wars.

Slauerhoff considered himself a late-born and weakened descendant of Western culture doomed to live in decadent, degenerating and self-destructive times. These ideas come together in his two ‘China novels’ Het verboden rijk (The Forbidden Kingdom, 1932) and its sequel Het leven op aarde (Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, 1934). Here, the hollowness is not just a metaphor for the poet’s need for inspiration or an expression of romantic longing but an existential problem linked to the decline of Western culture. The main character in both novels is Cameron, a solitary man tired of his life as an outcast and hoping to free himself from his miserable self. He is a twentieth-century Irish-born ship’s radio operator but is not considered to be a real Irishman because he is said to have Celtic or Iberian forefathers. He has lost contact with his family, has no friends, no steady relationships and lives an isolated life at sea.

In The Forbidden Kingdom he is nameless, and suffers a mental crisis after surviving a shipwreck off the east coast of southern France. He feels empty, and starts recovering strange memories from the Portuguese past. He goes back to sea to work on boats in the Far East where the strange memories become stronger. Unknowingly he travels to places in and around the Portuguese enclave of Macao where the exiled sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Camões once lived. Gradually the spirit of Camões takes control of Cameron, and the two characters merge when Cameron arrives at the location in the Chinese desert where Camões had supposedly died. Their merged personalities separate again after their return to Macao: Camões lives on in the past and Cameron awakes in the present in a dirty Chinese hotel. He realises that he can’t escape from his fate by letting himself be demonised by a spirit from the past. He doesn’t want to return to sea, and decides to penetrate deep into China to either lose himself in the delights of opium or become an enlightened soul.

Cameron’s identity problem is set against the background of the cultural decline of Europe, Portugal and Macao in opposition to the unalterable immobility of ancient China. The struggle that he has with the spirit of Camões can be seen as a metaphor for the dangerous inspiration Slauerhoff sought through his identification with poets from the past.

In Adrift in the Middle Kingdom Cameron is identified by his name, suggesting that he has gained an identity. Why Slauerhoff gave him a Scottish rather than an Irish surname is not explained: he may have chosen Cameron because of its similarity to Camões. That he is Irish seems simply to have been due to Slauerhoff’s encounter with an Irish ship’s radio operator during his first visit to Macao around the New Year of 1927, where he made his first notes for The Forbidden Kingdom (Blok and Lekkerkerker 1985, 32–33). He also used Ireland’s nickname ‘the Emerald Isle’ and the name of the small islet next to Macao, Ilha Verde (Green Island), to indicate a connection between the lives of Camões and Cameron.

Between 22 October 1925 and 1 September 1927 Slauerhoff visited Shanghai nine times and stayed there in total for around thirty days. He made some friends in the city, including the French harbour pilot Paul Fouletier, to whom Adrift in the Middle Kingdom is dedicated, and his wife Claire, who lent some traits to the character of Solange. Their house in the French concession with its opium room inspired the description of the house of Hsiu in Chapter 3. In his diary Slauerhoff recorded opium sessions in their house, where he met two other Frenchmen, Sylvain and Godet (Slauerhoff 2012, 137–138, 145–146). Characters with the same names appear in chapter 3 in passages adapted from his diary. Slauerhoff smoked opium but, because he was asthmatic, breathing difficulties and coughing seizures often ruined the effects.

In the first four chapters Slauerhoff used many personal observations and experiences from his life aboard ship and his visits to Amoy and Shanghai, but the rest of the book was set in parts of China he had not visited. He fitted in experiences from elsewhere in China and other information gathered from a variety of printed sources, but not with the intention of giving a topographically and geographically accurate description of a journey from Shanghai (Taihai in the novel) up the Yangtze River and over land to Chungking. He used his sources mainly to collect Chinese terms and local colour, and to get information about landscapes, vegetation, the climate, the population, housing and local customs. Much of what he describes is easily recognisable as being close to the China of his day, but many places passed by the expedition to Chungking are not where Slauerhoff describes them as being. The most remarkable case is Chungking which he moved far to the northwest of Chongqing, not on the Yangtze River but on the Yellow River (Huang He). Slauerhoff constructed his fictional city with elements from a description and a map of Chengdu from the Géographie universelle (1927, tome IX, première partie), to which he added some features of what seems to be Liangzhou (modern Wuwei), an important old international trade city on the Northern Silk Road (Blok and Lekkerkerker 1985, 117–120 and 164–165).

The obvious name change of Shanghai to Taihai is an early warning to the reader about the fictional character of Chinese space in the novel. Slauerhoff selected and manipulated elements from Chinese reality and history to construct a virtual China which provides the symbolic setting for Cameron’s journey. His compact and terse style – considered edgy and unpolished but highly authentic by some of his critics – is charged with implicit meaning. Instead of telling and explaining Slauerhoff shows and suggests, creating a dream-like atmosphere where strong visual images of landscape and surroundings reflect Cameron’s state of mind and the stages of his quest. A modernist use of symbolisation, metaphor and allegory adds an extra dimension to the narrative, cutting it loose from realism and turning China into a metaphor for the Unknown or the Void that Cameron is confronted with after losing his social, religious and philosophical certainties.

The story is narrated mainly from Cameron’s first-person perspective, with the exception of the panoramic chapters 9, 11 and 16, the beginning of chapter 4 and Kia So’s letter to Wan Chen in chapter 10. Alienated in the foreign Chinese environment Cameron doesn’t have a clear view of the situations he is in or the people he meets; this causes his judgement to falter and raises doubts about his perception of reality. Despite his passive attitude his hope of finding a better life keeps him going, although he doesn’t know where it will lead him. Slauerhoff confronts Cameron’s existential hollowness and his struggle with emptiness with Buddhist views represented by Chinese characters who identify his attitude and facial features with those of oriental sages who live detached from the world. Kia So is frightened after seeing Cameron’s photograph sent by Hsiu to Chungking. He recognises the features of an anchorite and fears that this foreigner will bring destruction to the city. The Tuchun, on the other hand, is favourably impressed when he meets Cameron, and the monk Wan Chen guides and protects this foreigner, unbeknown to Cameron himself.

Hints and allusions earlier in the book suggest that Cameron has experienced Buddhist influences ever since his arrival in Taihai. When Cameron visits Hsiu’s house the Chinese merchant is pictured as ‘a fat, burly Chinaman with a smooth, pudgy face and a receding forehead that merges with his shiny scalp’ and later ‘seated at a desk as massive and ornate as an altar’: he looks like a statue of the Buddha (38 and 63). Hsiu is a criminal merchant but also, according to Solange, ‘a wise man’ who seems at home with Buddhist and Taoist wisdom and sends Cameron on a three months’ pilgrimage to a remote shrine high up in the mountains of Shantung before their journey to the interior begins. This immoral bandit-sage seems to be beyond good and evil, a possible echo of one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts about Buddhism that Slauerhoff – an interested and regular reader of his work – must have known: ‘Buddhism already has – and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity – the self-deception of moral concepts behind it – it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil’ (Nietzsche, 129). For Cameron the journey with Hsiu is a second stage on the Buddhist ladder after his friendship with Chu the watchmaker in the Taihai suburb, from whom he rented a room, and who believed life is continuous change ruled by the ‘wheel of existence’, the endless cycle of birth, life on earth, death and rebirth. That a person can free himself from this cycle and attain nirvana when they understand that mundane life is impermanent and that attachment to it is the cause of desire, suffering and pain, appears to be the message of the journey.

The expedition passes through a timeless China, through scenes of horror, ruin, death and decay. On Hsiu’s junk they sail up the Yangtze River through its seasonal flooding, where people are starving and drowning. Hsiu mercilessly profits from the hungry by trading rice and beans against their last money and valuables. By forbidding Cameron to share his food with the desperate peasants, Hsiu teaches Cameron to detach himself from feeling pity. On the second part of the journey they travel by camel and on horseback through empty deserts where people live in holes in the ground and only an occasional ruined grave or house is to be seen. The expedition is surrounded by symbols of death and decay and seems to represent a passage through an inferno of human suffering meant to detach Cameron from life.

For a long time Cameron seems to succeed in freeing himself from his Western past and his attachment to life and worldly longings. When he arrives in Chungking his detachment and progress towards enlightenment are noted by Kia So and the Tuchun, and by Wan Chen whom Cameron sees when he is led before the Tuchun, though Wan Chen is invisible to others. Cameron is lodged in the house of the last descendant of Pedro Velho, a character from The Forbidden Kingdom, who lived in Macao in the time of Camões and moved to Chungking. The host and the house, with a room full of relics from the Portuguese past, are a threat Cameron is now able to resist. From his room he can see a ‘serene white mountain top’ in the distance that seems to attract him. The mountain is part of the Land of Snows in Tibet where Wan Chen and other Buddhist monks fight demons that obstruct the process of rebirth of the dying.

Cameron and his own past are activated when the Tuchun orders him to build a radio. Gaining freedom of movement in and around the city to search for materials he can use and fearing death if he fails, he feels an attachment to life again. During his explorations he notices that oil is seeping from excavations in the ground. When he demonstrates the radio the oil well erupts, flooding and destroying the city. Its yellow colour makes the Chinese think that the underworld (Yellow Springs) has opened and that they are all going to die because the radio experiment has angered the gods. An explosion follows and seems to kill Cameron.

In the Epilogue, however, he finds himself on the mountain top he had seen from Velho’s house. Wan Chen beckons to him from the Land of Snows, but when Cameron tries to reach him he falls and enters the poppy fields of the ‘western paradise’ where he experiences perfect happiness smoking opium and endless pleasures with a woman who is ‘more than all who preceded her’. But the paradise doesn’t last and Wan Chen tells Cameron that he is not strong enough to come with him to the Land of Snows. Cameron returns to the Middle Kingdom to ‘go on wandering without ever stopping, until the end, avoiding Europeans, no longer hoping for closer contact with the Chinese’ (228). He takes no further part in life on earth. ‘I had fulfilled life’s meaning, largely in spite of myself, through the twists and turns of my fate, liberating myself from the conspiracy of lineage and menacing spirits, and conceiving the narrow remainder of my days. I would not have to destroy myself before my time’ (228).

Cameron cannot enter the Land of Snows and does not reach nirvana because of his attachment to life. The Epilogue seems to describe a near-death experience and the episode in the western paradise is based on the description of the Fourth Day of the fourteen days of apparitions of seven peaceful and seven wrathful deities that the deceased will see from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Blok and Lekkerkerker, 263–65). On that day the deceased should concentrate on the dazzlingly bright red light of the apparition of the Buddha Amitabha, the Light of Wisdom, and not on the dull red light of the Preta-loka that shines at the same time. Cameron, however, seems to follow the light of the Preta-loka and the passion of attachment, lust and feelings. He sees the red of the poppy fields and experiences the bliss of opium and bodily love with a woman instead of seeing Amitabha and the lake with the white lotus flowers of rebirth. Cameron indulges in an intensified form of the worldly pleasures he idealised earlier but never could enjoy fully. He chose the wrong red light and is not prepared to be reborn.

The main source for Slauerhoff’s descriptions of Wan Chen and the Land of Snows was Mystiques et magiciens du Tibet (Paris 1929) by Alexandra David-Néel, from which he took many extraordinary details about the life and practices of Tibetan monks. The life story of All-But-One he adapted from a fragment from Sergej Tretyakov’s ‘bio-interview’ Den Schi-Chua (Berlin 1932) (Blok and Lekkerkerker, 165–67; A Chinese Testament: The Autobiography of Tan Shih-hua, 1934). His sources and the Buddhist themes which Cameron responds to show that Slauerhoff wrote more than an exotic adventure or a work of fantasy. Adrift in the Middle Kingdom is an unconventional novel that is perhaps best characterised as an allegorical novel of ideas. Its modernist theme, techniques and multi-layered meanings made it unique in Dutch literature at the time and the early encounter between existentialist and Buddhist thought was decades ahead of Western interest in Zen and Buddhism.

Slauerhoff and China

by WENDY GAN

The China of Slauerhoff’s Adrift in the Middle Kingdom is an artful construction. This fact is easily forgotten, especially when the opening chapters overwhelm the reader with a documentary grittiness that was obviously drawn from his personal observations and experiences. As a ship’s doctor working the China-Java-Japan route between 1925 and 1927, Slauerhoff had ample opportunity to explore the China coast, including the cities of Amoy and ‘Taihai’. He also had occasion to observe the Chinese at close quarters – not just the Chinese sailors who would have been his shipmates but the numerous passengers that his ships transported between south-east Asia and China. All of this results in an introduction to China that is steeped in an earthy reality, reminiscent of Pearl S Buck’s best-selling and groundbreaking novel The Good Earth (1931). Slauerhoff’s China is not an exotic, romanticised world populated by the gracious sages and delicate maidens made familiar by chinoiserie. Instead, like Buck, he levels a non-judgmental eye at the underclasses, conscious of their poverty and what acts poverty drives them to – the emaciated and exploited tin-mine workers returning home with wealth earned at the cost of their health, the houseboat family willing to prostitute their daughter for a dollar. It is an unsparing and unsentimental portrayal of China, and this downbeat approach extends even to his depiction of the most glamorous of Oriental cities, Shanghai.

That Slauerhoff chooses to call Shanghai Taihai is an important reminder that, in spite of the grim realism with which the novel begins, he is dealing with an imagined China. Yet Slauerhoff’s intimate familiarity with Shanghai and its temptations makes it difficult to read Taihai as merely fantastical. Indeed Taihai is often nothing more than Shanghai with its cesspool aspects amplified, a surreal, sometimes nightmarish, locale for a protagonist on edge. An unpromising piece of territory ceded to foreign powers in the aftermath of the First Opium War, Shanghai had developed since its founding in 1842 into a financial and trading powerhouse. The treaty port consisted of the International concession, which was governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (comprising mostly British and American residents with some representation from the Japanese), and the French concession, which lay next to it. Together, they formed International Shanghai, an extraterritorial haven where Chinese law did not apply and foreigners were free to recreate their home lives as they pleased. Though many a Shanghailander (as residents of International Shanghai were called) attempted to live in deliberate ignorance of the Chinese, this was clearly impossible. International Shanghai was dependent not only on Chinese servants for the smooth running of its households, but also on Chinese property owners who paid rates essential to the governance of the territory (certain sections of Chinese society – revolutionaries, the criminal element, the well-off – had discovered the advantages of having a residence outside Chinese legal jurisdiction and yet still within China). Furthermore, adjacent to International Shanghai was the teeming Chinese city of Shanghai itself. Shanghai was therefore a hybrid, cosmopolitan hub where the Orient and the Occident rubbed shoulders and, in that febrile atmosphere, it grew into a glittering example of an urbane, modern city combining the best (and worst) of East and West.

Shanghai had an underbelly and its centre was located in the French concession. Rue Chu Pao San, better known as Blood

Reviews for Adrift in the Middle Kingdom

[pauliensijbers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Clearly a member of the Company of Melancholiacs (J.P. Jacobsen). A drifter taking you with his on his journey. How lovely it is to live with his solitude for a while.